Please join us for a seminar talk by Gabriel Reygondeau.

Quantification and theorisation of Global Marine Biodiversity under a climate change

Abstract

Latitudinal diversity gradients (LDGs), with species richness peaking in the tropics and tailing off towards the poles, form one of global biodiversity’s most remarkable macroecological patterns. LDGs have been detected in the field for many taxa, time periods and regions. Accordingly, several theories have been proposed to explain LDG but mostly in the context of terrestrial ecosystems. Only few studies have attempted to extend this topic to the global ocean and it has been usually performed on a limited taxonomical group with a lack comprehensible observation over the global Ocean.

Here, we assemble a global multi-taxonomic dataset, including 51 million records for 41,625 extant marine species ranging from phytoplanktons to mammals. We identify global marine emergent macro-ecological patterns for the full marine biodiversity and per taxonomical group and quantify a ecogeographic indices to analyze and evaluate common theories on LDGs. Furthermore, we apply an ensemble species distribution models to evaluate the potential impact of global climate change on the different communities of the Global Ocean

Bio

Gabriel Reygondeau is a senior fellow at the University of British Columbia in the research team Changing Ocean Research Unit. He mainly focuses on the effect of climate change and fisheries on ecosystem dynamic and biodiversity at a global scale.

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